The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots

by The New York Observer

  One flight up, the mandarin office of the publisher, a huge Oriental frieze staring down at the participants below, black-and-white photographs of Thomas Mann and Einstein smiling down at the whole enterprise. Across the hall, ad salespeople: glamorous, dark and shiny ladies with a sheen, first single, then married, then single, with dangerous ebony hairdos like movie noir heroines.

  Cranking up and down, a cage elevator, witness to God knows how many muttered or screaming conversations, creaking up and down among the four floors and the cool basement, where checks were cut that soothed tempers on the other floors.

  Highest of all in this crazy little enterprise, the dotty fireworks of the fourth floor, where politics were dissected, plots hatched, sociology sprinkled, coffee guzzled and names thrown around: Mario, Harvey, Rudy, Jerry, Puff, Woody, Punch, Si, Liz, Rupert. Hidden calls from psychiatrists, occasional nervous breakdowns not-so-manqué, pranks of Homeric intricacy, involving a floating cast of characters that appeared to the in-house residents of the house like the offstage stock company in a sitcom during the Seinfeldian 90’s. Story subjects called and screamed; others showed up for some mischief: Bill Murray, Mike Wallace, the occasional mayor. Norman Mailer, clanking in on a cane to bring draft after draft of his cartoon “Puffs.” Bill O’Reilly and Carol Channing were on the phone. Martinis were served in summer, and “Sex and the City” came and went. And then the giddiness came to a freeze-frame on Sept. 11, 2001. The smoke from the south of Manhattan hung acrid above 64th Street as editors slumped on their desks.

  There was Leon the office-supplies guy, who gave out pencils one at a time, and Angie the switchboard operator, who shrieked the editors’ names up the stairwell like Stanley Kowalski, and the young intern who everyone was afraid might have explosives strapped under his shirt. But nobody brought out the curious empathy of the building like the librarian who sat in her cubby making small cooing noises like a pigeon and one day just fluttered away without notice, leaving behind the French-fairy-tale possibility that she had been a bird all along.

  Now we’re moving downtown, to a classy old skyscraper two blocks south of the Flatiron Building, in the neighborhood of the Gramercy Tavern and Eisenberg’s, but not the magnificent coffee shops Gardenia and the Viand, where big Pete and smooth George respectively presided. The girls will be younger downtown and not as well dressed, but not as dressed. The billionaires will still be there, but their drivers will be waiting to take them back uptown.

  Around the corner and up the street from us was a tall, distinctive luxury building with a Citibank, its first floor faced in blue bricks, an anomaly of bad taste in our chichi neighborhood. Its brazen cluelessness made it stand out like a structure in Munchkin Land, the sector of L. Frank Baum’s Oz that was all blue among the high-rises of the Emerald City. They could never fill the joint up, and the Europeans eating lunch at La Goulue used to stare up at its strange refusal to be tasteful as though it was the public-school girl in polyester at the Cotillion. Now the owners, finally wised-up, have caved, and they’re refacing it in mud-brown brick, another Madison Avenue makeover.

  Goodbye, blue-brick poseur, goodbye, red-brick townhouse; we’re heading south, toward Broadway. There are fresh, grotesque and homely anomalies downtown.

  * * *

  While up into our building trooped writers: the cheeky, the depressed, the jolly, the mission-driven, the perky. On the first floor, in what had been a grand dining room, the production department: hot waxers reminiscent of—not reminiscent of, identical to!—your high-school paper’s.

  * * *

  JULY 26, 2004 BY RACHEL DONADIO, SHEELAH KOLHATKAR AND ANNA SCHNEIDER-MAYERSON

  STUFF IT, EMO BOY!

  RECENTLY REBECCA HACKEMANN, a 32-year-old artist, had a distressing third date with a banker type she’d met on Nerve.com. He flipped out when Ms. Hackemann showed up 20 minutes late after some trouble on the subway. “You know, you just can’t be late like this,” whined the athletic, 42-year-old fellow after she had sat down and apologized profusely. “You don’t know what it does to me emotionally,” he continued. “Next time, we’re just going to have to make sure you’re on time.

  “It’s partly to do with my past,” he added after they had placed their orders.

  The banker is emblematic of an alarming moment in gender relations here in New York: the rampant spread of the emo man (or perhaps more appropriately, emo boy). Originally referring to a floppy-limbed, “sincere” indie-rock movement, emo gathered speed during the Clinton feel-your-pain era. Now it has landed squarely in the laps of disgusted Manhattan women like Ms. Hackemann.

  OCTOBER 25, 2004 BY JOE HAGAN & SHEELAH KOLHATKAR

  REVOLT OF FOX’S HENS

  THIS HAS BEEN A BLOODY AND unpleasant couple of weeks at the Fox News Channel. A producer named Andrea Mackris brought a sexual harassment suit against Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News Channel brand-name host of The O’Reilly Factor and inventor of the TV territory called the “No-Spin Zone.”

  The details of Ms. Mackris’ complaints are grisly and involve late-night dinners, dirty conversations and an electronic apparatus that no boss should ever recommend to an employee as office equipment. For his part, Mr. O’Reilly was prepared with a preemptive suit; the Fox News Channel almost immediately attempted to surgically remove Ms. Mackris from the company, implausibly asserting that her dismissal had nothing to do with her court complaint against Mr. O’Reilly.

  But when Fox News’ highest-profile female journalist, Greta Van Susteren, host of On the Record, was asked about Andrea Mackris’ sexual-harassment suit against Mr. O’Reilly, she threw the ball elsewhere.

  “I have an open door all the way to the top in this company,” she said, “and I’ve got nothing about walking right through that door. If I heard about it, believe me, I would not look the other way. I would speak up. I don’t want that in my environment, and I would raise hell. I wouldn’t raise hell in the newspaper, but I would raise hell in the organization.

  “Which is what I did at CNN.”

  Ms. Van Susteren, who became a legal analyst at CNN in 1991, said she “left CNN because of the way they were mistreating people. I’d do the same here. I’d walk out of here. If I heard about a situation that was not being addressed—I don’t sit back. I’m a lawyer.” Ms. Van Susteren’s complaints about CNN didn’t include the dinners, telephone calls and electric vibrators that show up in Ms. Mackris’ suit against Mr. O’Reilly.

  But they suggested the same principle that many women interviewed by The Observer have asserted since Ms. Mackris’ vivid charges against Mr. O’Reilly have been reported: TV news is a generally inhospitable place for women to work. It often involves unequal pay for comparable work. It nurtures and inspires sexual harassment in a pressured, heightened environment filled with risks and rewards, highs and lows, and often staffed by malleable younger women producers and assistants assigned to the care and feeding of outsized male egos.

  Few women under the age of 40 were willing to speak on the record for this piece about their harassment experiences, or even the sexist culture of TV news in general. But this was a shockingly easy story to gather anecdotal material for, on background.

  “The television industry in general is rampant with sexual harassment, and it’s very difficult for women at a low level to complain or do anything about it,” said Lisa Bloom, a Court TV anchor and sexual-harassment attorney. “As you can see with what’s happened to Andrea Mackris, it’s brutal. That’s why they don’t come forward. They put up with it, they change jobs, engage in avoidance. It’s a small industry in New York, especially in cable news, and we all know each other. You move around a lot, and your reputation follows you. And if you offend the top brass at one TV network, they’re very tight with top brass at other networks. Word will spread, and you’ll have a hard time getting a job.”

  Illustrated by Barry Blitt

  The Baby Botoxers: Prep school gals seek radical cheeks

  Illustrated by Robert Grossman

>   SEPTEMBER 6, 2004 BY PHILIP WEISS

  Invasion of Bushy Snatchers

  AN EMPIRE REQUIRES an imperial city, and the Republicans turned New York into the backlot for Julius Caesar. They used the grand scale and took over the grand elegant spaces as backdrop. Their bridle-bit loafers passed softly over the worn marble and mosaic floors of high culture. Once everyone who lives here fled town, they took over. The city they occupied and remade wasn’t quite New York, it was more like Neo York. Grand but toneless, a little off.

  There was to be nothing ideological or even conservative at the New York convention. They wanted the tone of New York’s liberalism to rub off on them, too, the way cultural conservatives want their hair cut by a gay hairdresser or to hear a little Philip Glass in the middle of an all-Sousa concert. They needed it. New York’s sophistication. They wanted that to help their image. The Republicans do not want to seem narrow to America, beady-eyed and dangerous. They don’t want to feel that way about themselves, either. They want the pleasure of thinking of themselves as New Yorkers are able to think of themselves: clued-in, toney, broad-minded, triumphant. They wanted to put on New York airs. And they have.

  On Monday night they took over both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Central Building of the New York Public Library. Corporate lobbyists threw big parties for the Congressional leadership under lemony light against old stone. The Met was the fancier event. Tom DeLay at the Temple of Dendur. Tom DeLay under glass, facing Fifth Avenue and the entrance to Central Park, acquiring international culture and the history of the ages at the Met, just south and west of the building from which Jacqueline K. Onassis used to stare down at the park.

  The word went out among the Republican wives to wear black to the Met. This is New York, you wear black. Black is the sophisticated color in New York.

  So a procession of Republican women went up the great steps of the Metropolitan, almost all of them in black. Black pant-suits. A short black dress. Another black pantsuit. Yes, now and then a howler: pinstriped pants, as if she had gotten on half the Yankees’ home uniform. But most of the ladies had gotten the signal right and worn black. A cropped black jacket, gathered at the back, with the long dangling ends of the string, capped in silver, dancing naughtily against the lady’s pert black rump. Very empire.

  Some ladies, under the black suits, had put on tangerine or sky-blue blouses. Tangerine. See, there was something off.

  And sad, too—not chipper and conventiony, but sad. You walked through the city and it was no longer yours. Anybody with New York in the spirit had decamped, and now the Republicans were doing their best to imitate the departed, and not quite making it. The country singer Lee Greenwood had come into Cipriani 42d Street to sing his hit “God Bless the U.S.A.,” with the Harlem Boys Choir behind him. The crowd sang along with him, and the boys and girls of the choir watched him with smiling befuddlement.

  Lee Greenwood was a star out of his element. He wore a new New York jacket and fiddled nervously with the buttons. He’s from California. Usually he wears jeans and cowboy boots and a five-day growth. He had put on this stiff new jacket over a fine cotton shirt and a blue jacquard tie, and seemed a mannequin in the Italian-made clothes, the country star lost in New York. See, there was something off.

  Bo Derek held forth at a press conference in a side room. Well, actually, she doesn’t hold forth. She’s a demure sort, in pastel paisley. She carried a bone-colored purse and said with a bashful sweetness that she was voting for George Bush because of his courage.

  A reporter baited her. “Are you the right wing’s answer to Susan Sarandon?”

  Bo wasn’t built for New York sarcasm, and her self-esteem cratered.

  Illustrated by Robert Grossman

  * * *

  Yes, and they have the worst judgment of any leaders since Vietnam, and all the world hates us, and our young men and women are dying by the handful for no good or clear reason. But an empire requires an imperial city, and there is only one.

  * * *

  “Absolutely not! She’s so smart, she’s so brilliant. Look at me, I’m blond!” She sent her shoulder-length hair flying with a hapless fling of her hand. “No one should vote the way I vote!”

  A blond joke, on herself. See, there was something off. It wasn’t savvy, even as it tried to be. Bo Derek wasn’t a stand-in for Susan Sarandon, and Lee Greenwood wasn’t comfortable in a landmarked bank building across from Grand Central. It occurred to you that in Vichy Paris they still had croissants and coffee, baguettes and nightlife, but it wasn’t the same there, either.

  “I’ve never seen the city so deserted,” said one of the Republican organizers, dejectedly. “We decided to come here as a way of saying thank you. That was the whole point.

  “And it all backfired because of the people who are protesting. The anarchists. So New York is being hurt instead.”

  She enjoyed saying that word, “anarchist.” All the Republicans did. But that was disingenuous. Whatever fears had sent New Yorkers out of town, the New Yorkers were gone, and that was the way the Republicans liked it. It fit in with their worldview. It was like having Disney World open to just your family on a Sunday. They were free to use all the locations. If waiters at Butter, the boîte next to the Public Theater on Lafayette, snickered at the guys in khakis who were ordering mojitos, so what? That was an inside joke among the passive resistance.

  Meantime, the Republicans would use New York to make themselves seem worldly, broad-minded. It was funny and it was painful. And so a place that is the embodiment of intellectual life, the Central Building of the New York Public Library, had gone goofy.

  Probably they were cowed by New York. Isn’t everyone when they get off the boat? Of course they were, as scared as a New Yorker in Texas seeing a gunrack in the pickup. They didn’t feel right, even stepping up the Metropolitan steps in new Manolo Blahnik shoes, having heard about Manolos on Sex in the City. They did not feel hip even as they tried. But that’s not the point. Something was working for them in these locations, and they did what everyone does in New York, they imagined themselves in a new way. They imagined themselves open-minded and sophisticated.

  A pretty Senate operative from California had ordered Chinese at 2 in the morning from her hotel room—“because I could,” she announced triumphantly—and got an irritated look when you said the word “abortion.” “We come here as an exercise in patriotism and duty, not because of any ideology.”

  So the Republican had prochoicers give speeches on the opening night and their pro-choice group co-hosted a rock concert at the Beacon. And at a big gathering for women in the Waldorf-Astoria—“W Stands for Women”—Vice President Cheney’s straight daughter talked about her four kids and used the word “gender” 100 times, signaling to right and left, while Mr. Cheney’s wife said that women in Afghanistan no longer had their fingers amputated for wearing fingernail polish.

  Fingernail polish in Islam. See, there was something a little off about that. A little tone-deaf, as a human rights message.

  A lady from Orange County, Mary Young, wore a giant button saying Red Hot Republican.

  “Mary, you know what that means in New York,” a reporter said. “You’re saying you’re sexy, you’re hot.”

  Mary dissolved. “Oh no. That’s not why I bought it. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, a red-blooded Republican, hot-blooded Republican.”

  The convention’s position on the Iraq war was also shrewd. It was a position meant to play outside the New York Public Library. We all can disagree. Yes, George Bush has made some tactical mistakes. Rudy Giuliani said, None of us is always right. Lindsey Graham said, George Bush has had to make decisions every day, day in and day out. Not everyone is going to like you.

  But why question the president’s decisions? They came out of resolution, courage, firmness. Male virtues. When the fires of hell rose from New York. This great city that belongs to all of us.

  “We live in times of peril,” Lynne Cheney said at the Waldorf
-Astoria, “and it is such a comfort to all of us to have these good men who are so solid, so stable, leading our country. And both these men are surrounded by strong women.”

  Yes, and they have the worst judgment of any leaders since Vietnam, and all the world hates us, and our young men and women are dying by the handful for no good or clear reason. But an empire requires an imperial city, and there is only one. Ladies, when you go to the Temple of Dendur, wear black.

  Illustrated by Victor Juhasz

  2005

  Dan Rather retires as anchorman of CBS Evening News after forged-memo controversy

  Mayor Michael Bloomberg ratified in landslide reelection victory

  Guarded by dashing doorman Armin Amiri, Amy Sacco’s Bungalow 8 rules the night

  Generation Zzzzz: New Yorkers curl up with gentle sleeping aid Ambien

  Pitt splits! Brad and Jennifer Aniston split as maneater Angelina Jolie muscles in

  Web wars: HuffPo is left’s answer to Drudge; Nick Denton builds online empire

  The Plame game: Times reporter Judy Miller plugs White House leak with 85 days in jail

  Hurricane Katrina leaves New Orleans flooded, bereft

  JetBlue flight broadcasts own emergency landing on DirecTV; Observer editor lives

  2005

  JANUARY 16, 2005 BY ANNA SCHNEIDER-MAYERSON

  PUSSES IN BOOTS, ’05

  NICOLE LEACH, A PETITE PEROXIDE blonde of 25, was standing inside the slick 10th Avenue bar Glass on a recent sodden evening, looking a bit like a risqué elf in a black camisole and bright red pants…tucked into knee-high, rubber-soled, maroon suede boots from Macy’s. “It’s about style, not something you’re wearing because it’s cold,” said Ms. Leach, who said she makes her living as a “performer.” “I like the way it looks. It evens your whole leg out.”